> For anyone who wants to learn to cook my advice is not to learn recipes but instead learn ingredients, tools and techniques. Good books like Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking dedicate many pages to this before they get into recipes
Hard, hard disagree here. Learn some recipes, enjoy eating some food that you've cooked for yourself. Cook some recipes you like for 6 months and _then_ start learning the techniques and fundamentals.
I didn't say don't read or follow recipes like some kind of culinary monk. Using recipes is as important to a cook as reading programs is to a programmer. But the focus, if you want to learn to cook, should be on ingredients, tools and techniques. For a start, you will not enjoy making any recipe without a good knife. What's more, your execution will be terrible if you don't know what "finely diced onion" is supposed to be or how to make it, or how much "salt to taste" is. You won't enjoy it and will forever think restaurant/takeaway food is better than your own creations.
Recipes are always written at a particular level of abstraction. Most won't tell you how to dice an onion, but many will tell you explicitly how to make a roux, without saying the word roux. Learning the basics means you can skim and assimilate recipes at a much higher level. Plenty of people can follow recipes but few can learn a recipe from first principles as there are far too many details. To learn a recipe you need to first learn the basics, then you find a recipe is rather easy to learn. Then once you can do that you have the power to tweak them or substitute ingredients etc. as necessary and/or desired.
I feel much the same way about food recipes as I do about tech how-to's which describe steps but not reasons.
A simple statement of ingredients, processing, times, temperatures, etc., should get you something serviceable. But a guide which tells you what each ingredient, step, etc., is doing to the finished product is far more informative. Also those which let you know whether a value is a minimum or maximum, and how much flexibility there is to it. Much the same as a step-by-step systems admin guide works if everything goes right, but is entirely useless if you run up against a problem, in which case what you desperately need is troubleshooting and compensation/correction guidance.
For example, if a sourdough bread-making recipe gives an instruction "autolyse for 30 minutes", is there any indication that going shorter or longer is possible, or even preferable? (In practice you can autolyse for hours if you choose to do so, 20--40 minutes is a minimum.) How sensitive is dough to overfermentation? What will more, or less, salt do? How does starter change its behaviour in warmer or cooler conditions? What's too warm? Is there such a thing as too cold? How should you adjust hydration for different doughs (whole wheat, rye, spelt, einkorn, semolina, etc. --- something I'm still learning FWIW, though generally WW more, rye less, spelt about the same). How does dough change with a longer cold ferment (1 day vs. 2, 3, or more)?
A recipe is is a sequence with no flow or feedback logic to it. Techniques give you tools to control the process.
I will try to give an example: you find a recipe you like at first glance and try to cook it. It's from East Asia and contains tofu, so you buy tofu, and if you live in Central Europe like me there is good chance the tofu will be completely different to what should the tofu in that recipe be like. Same for the rice (and other ingredients). The result will not be ideal, to say the least, because while the recipe might have been good and you may followed it correctly, the fundamentals weren't there.
Improvisation is an art in itself. Tofu is easy, try recreating something like Osaka-style okonomiyaki with European ingredients, now that is a challenge!
So yes and no in my opinion. First, almost all recipes are written from being cooked in gas stoves and ovens. However, many people have electric. That alone will cause you a problem. Second, tweaking or hacking a little bit of a recipe is a great way to learn what techniques and ingredients do while not breaking the bank. At some point, you will have learned ingredients, tools, and techniques and you can just "cook". You know, like your grandmother could just cook somehow. It was from practice and experience and she always had her own "secret" recipes.
Hard, hard disagree here. Learn some recipes, enjoy eating some food that you've cooked for yourself. Cook some recipes you like for 6 months and _then_ start learning the techniques and fundamentals.